Modern authors can feel commercially obliged to write about sex in all its
lurid detail, novelist Julian Barnes has suggested, with “old euphemisms”
being replaced by “misleading new clichés” in a freshly liberated world.

The author said his contemporaries struggled with the problem of how to write about the intimate, striking the difficult balance of how much to explain, imply or omit.

He claimed the newly-tolerant view of sex in literature had led to badly written scenes now ranging from the “pornographic to the facetious to the over- solemn”, with each being “easy to mock” by generations to come.

Barnes, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending, said the failure of the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity prosecution had led to a new world for writers.

Writing in the Radio Times about hearing the outcome aged 14, he said: “At last, I remember thinking, British literature would be able to catch up with foreign, especially French, literature, which for a century had been far more truth-telling – and far more titillating – than its British equivalent.

“But having a new freedom and knowing what to do with it were two quite different things.

“Instead of a blanket prohibition, there was almost the reverse: not just a writerly desire, but a commercial obligation to write in a detailed way about sex.

“And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by the misleading new clichés.”

The author added the case had led to British literature “growing up” when it came to sexual relationships.

Despite the liberation of being able to write about the topic, Barnes argued sex scenes also come with increased anxieties for authors.

Not only do they have to contend with writing it in a convincing manner, he suggested, but they must also combat the assumption it is all drawn from personal experience.

He wrote: “It’s easy to mock, and each generation will mock the previous one because each generation tends to imagine that its attitude to sex strikes just about the right balance; that by comparison its predecessors were prim and embarrassed, its successors sex-obsessed and pornified.

“And so writing about sex contains an additional anxiety on top of all the usual ones: that the writer might be giving him- or herself away, that readers may conclude, when you describe a sexual act, that it must already have happened to you in pretty much the manner described.”

Barnes claimed such a concern had led late author Kingsley Amis to abandon a 1980s novel because it contained a gay character and he feared “the chaps at the club might think I was queer”.

“This seemed, even at the time, a pitiful excuse, and seems the more pitiful with hindsight,” Barnes said.

The ideas in his article are supported by the recent success of erotic novels including Fifty Shades of Grey and similar spin-offs, with millions of readers illicitly enjoying them on e-readers.

Author E L James has regularly refuted claims the sado-masochistic content of the novels is based on her own experience.

Jonathan Reeves, an editor at Amberley Publishing, said the phenomenon is also apparent in the business of writing non-fiction, with a recent title involving sex and the Tudors selling very well.

“It certainly doesn’t hurt,” he added.

The full article, written to publicise upcoming BBC Radio 3 show The Essay: Explaining the Explicit appears in this week’s Radio Times.